3. From the Maemo tutorials, it looks like it uses some mix of a special API (the Hildon stuff) and GTK. How difficult is this to learn (I've done GUI programming with the Win32 APIs and have a very rudimentary knowledge of Qt, but almost no GTK knowledge) and how much knowledge is transferrable to making desktop GTK apps? Is it possible to use something like Qt on it?
From some recent blogs/mailinglists it looks like one of the main Qtopia/Opie developers have got one of those devices, so I'll say it's only a matter of time before you have Qt on it. Most likely the Qt embedded stuff, so you get the benefit of the whole application stack for Qtopia/Opie(Opie also gives positive reply to the rest of your questions:-).
No they have not. It was just some musing from that John Dvorak fellow, where he wrote an article outlining why he thought that it would be a good idea for MS to buy Opera. None of his points where particularly good either, just his usuall less then cluefull drivel. Then some other even less cluefull at a site, CoolTechZone I think, turned his musings into rumor and reported it as fact. The only thing that annoys me most with those buyout rumours is that I don't have any Opera stock myself. Besides I predict that in the future Opera will get bought by Sun, Novell, IBM, Nitendo, Nokia and Sony-Ericsson in no particular order, all according to rumours. The last two even makes some sense in a small way.
The Linux BlueZ site wasn't selling anything either.
Not entirely true, they was "selling" the fact of which devices having support/works with Bluez/Bluethooth under Linux. They where not charging any money for it, but does not matter. Non-profit organizations are not exempt form trademark law either.
More importantly a copy of K&R should be in every programing book authors shelf.
the clear writing style and tidy code snippets are an example to all.
Exactly and I wish other writers could emulate that approach rather than trying to write as many pages as possible. Take any C++ book and compare the section about the basic datatypes to K&R, usually 5 to 10 times the number of pages and K&R are still easier to understand.
And it's not only programming books, you find the similar style in other fields of science too. And it's rather consistent, making me believe that most American publishers of technical books pays their authors at a per page ratio.
That is the most annoying feature I have EVER come across
It's basically a really powerfull and userfriendly feature, but some have to actually use it to understand that.
i don't want to be forced to answer the "Do you want to..." for every single new type of media i have inserted.
Well how many different types of media do you regularly use? Probably no more than 4 or 5, most likely even less. And you then set the dialog to repeat that everytime with each of the mediatypes, making your preferred acction automatic rather. When that's done you will not see the dialog again for that media type. It's a rather smart designed feature. It lets you as a user define an automatic acction in a userfriendly way, rather than deciding for you what to do or doing nothing.
Does anyone use it at all?
Yes, regularly with audio CD's. I either want to play it or rip it, the dialog gives me easy access to both functions. And if I insert a DVD, I have set i to automatically open my preferred player.
Re:Let's just have one Linux desktop
on
KDE 3.5 Released
·
· Score: 1
A commercial licence for Qt is either $1800 or $3100 per developer
And that's equals something like the cost of a decent developer for 1-2 weeks, making the price totally irrelevant for someone doing real commercial development.
I've had automounting for quite some time under gnome. Is KDE really just now getting the same feature?
Nope, the automounting feature has worked in KDE for a long time. And even KDE 2.0 had seamless mounting of CDs and floppy. This has really nothing to do with the mounting part, it's a tool for automating the acctions preformed after the media is inserted. Like when you insert a audio CD you get an userfriendly dialog asking you if you want to play it, rip it or do noting. And you can easily set it to do the same automatically each time width that kind of media. Or to never show anything if you prefer(aka turning the feature off).
Re:Now we just need...
on
KDE 3.5 Released
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I know under the hood Gnome is supposed to be better
That's rather the strangest thing I have heard all day, KDE is generally thought to be cleaner and better than Gnome under the hood. With the better underlying technology and architecture.
Gnome seems to have the API right but the desktop wrong and KDE has the desktop but not the API.
Seems like you have got that one backwards, the API are the one thing people usually praise with KDE. The complaints are about the "cluttered" desktop, indication that they think Gnomes is better.
but quite frankly as long as it works I don't really care.
Agreed, and there's the point where KDE wins out in the end. It got the applications and features making it possible to get the things you want done.
The other main argument against KDE is that it is too much of a Windows clone.
Anyone who have actually used KDE know it's not true, as KDE is much more. Funny thing is, set KDE up with a non-blue color scheme and those complaints dissapear.
Firefox has had the yellow=secure for quite a while,
The same for Konqueror, but it does not really mater that much. In this case the IE7 approach makes more sense, so they agree to change it. Besides calling yellow the de-facto standard is not correct, as de-facto would be what IE5 and IE6 uses.
Why do embedded developers continue to imprison themselves in the GPL trap by using Linux,
Because Linux has a much bigger developer comunity and you can get commercial support targeted at embedded development from several vendors. Giving better freedom getting developer resources.
And the GPL "trap" as you call it, does not really matter even in embedded development. The interesting part of the product, or the part you may want not to GPL, will reside in userspace anyway making the GPL of the kernel irrelevant.
But all evidence points to this not being fact, since way more ISVs use Qt than GTK+ making that argument rather void. Commercial ISVs re used to, comfortable with and prefer paying for tools making their products better, cheaper to develop and having the safety commercial support.
It doesn't matter how good KDE is (and it's pretty good), its dependence on a dual-licensed GUI library kills it in commercial applications. Qt proponents can swear up and down that it doesn't matter to commercial customers, but the fact is that it does.
You often her that argument, but you never or hear see the follow up to it. Locally then the competing LGPLed library should be the preferred one for commercial applications. Why is it that the number of commercial Qt programs outnumber the GTK+ counterparts, with a rather large margin?
I wonder what percentage of the south korean economy is made up of those internet cafes. Switching OS's won't really be fun for them (if it comes to that.).
Does not really matter, as it's not like MS can reclaim already existing Windows installs. It may create some annoyances for people planing new deployments or upgrades, but existing install will not be affected in any way. It's like if Ford decided to stop making cars, it would not cause all the Fords currently on the road to stop working.
Some kind of international organization, governed by interest from several nation. Not giving the power to one single one.
An organization that will allow human rights abusers whose major intent will be to rob their own citizens of the ability to view the Internet freely?
That is a red herring, please call Amnesty some time and see which position they rank the US when it comes to abusing human rights. Hint, in the top ten.
Other than the xxx issue, can you think of any major abuse of the Internet done by the US government?
It only prove they have not done it yet. In important economical matters as the internet really is, you can't trust a nation which have used military force to protect corporations commercial interrest abroad. Repeatably.
Nope that's code for "The internet are a valuable global economic tool, which we more and more depend on. We don't trust a government who regularly(in the last 110 years or so) have used military intervention in foreign countries to aid US economic interest, to have sole controll over it."
And before anyone starts the flaming please read up on US history since 1900 or so. You will find something like 70 or more cases.
Why wouldn't these people be in favour of an.xxx domain? Hell, wouldn't it make it easier to block sites at work or home?
These people are not in favour of choice on this kind of issues, they are against the idea of people having access to porn period. They use the demand for blocking sites only as a weapon, as they know the cost and technical impossibility of the task helps their agenda. Having.xxx the domain will make filtering extremely simple weakening their arguments and loosing them support. And by that lessen their power base, which is their real main objective.
What a good idea.. think of how much money getting rid of half the directors sitting on the company's board would save!
Agreed and not only those. There are a few wielding director of something or other titles, actually regularly spreading FUD against main Novel products and part of their company product portfolio. I think it's time to get rid of those too.
As a fellow BCian we trade a heck of a lot of with China. That is what.. 16 hours ahead? (correct me if I am wrong) and we have no problems trading with them.
Then perhaps the average Chinese trading partner are smarter than the average American counterpart?
Yes, but not under the same conditions as Troll Tech; Troll Tech still retains the right to sell it under non-GPL'ed licenses.
Yes and they created it from scratch, nearly every line of code in Qt are paid for by Troll Tech. Usually they don't accept larger patches from the outside, they usually develop their own versions. So it's their property, they even give it all away under the GPL. And since you are talking about Free software, it does not really matter if they can sell it or not under a non-GPL license. Anyway you will most likely always be at an disadvantage trying to compete with Troll Tech on Qt, to even matter you'd need to have something in the land of 50-60 people full time doing development, documentation, QA and support. To simply match what they are doing, and to really compet you would have to do even better.
But if you want to compete with Troll Tech perhas you should start a toolkit from scratch, develop it over 10 years or so. Paying something like 50-60 full time employees to do the development, documentation and QA. Then you can come back and discuss giving your property away, or perhaps you have "got it" by then. BTW not even Linus and the Kernel hacker does that.
I remember my HP 48 being more stable.
Those things are rock solid, so that's a rather bad comparison. You may make them hang, but it's rather easy to track. Not seemingly random as with the average PC.
Link Grammar was developed for English, and currently that is all that it supports.
A reasonable approach, but it may give reduced fitness for other languages. Limiting them to your design decisions, and the flexibility of your rules files. Depending upon how much height you have in the design for non English grammar. I'd guess we'll see the answers to that when someone try to add support for french and german. Having said that, MS have used lots of $ trying to do the same. And their solutions are from what the reports say, for the most part arenot particularly good either.
love to have your contribution.
I am sad to admit that neither my linguistic skills in my native language or my math skills are up to the task. But if someone does, I'll try to help with testing and hopefully usefull bugreports.
I'd guess you are right, no one is going to care about this except those sorry bastards having their laptop on their lap when the battery overheat and melts.
Well many other languages have much simpler or more strict grammars than english so it is relevant for those, and with localisation for other areas that isn't a problem. By that I mean that maybe it works brilliant for 90% of languages but sometimes english isn't the best for everything.
It's most probable to be the other way, making it even worse for non english languages. As it most likely are developed to work with english as the primary language, making it nearly impossible to localize to other languages.
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3. From the Maemo tutorials, it looks like it uses some mix of a special API (the Hildon stuff) and GTK. How difficult is this to learn (I've done GUI programming with the Win32 APIs and have a very rudimentary knowledge of Qt, but almost no GTK knowledge) and how much knowledge is transferrable to making desktop GTK apps? Is it possible to use something like Qt on it? From some recent blogs/mailinglists it looks like one of the main Qtopia/Opie developers have got one of those devices, so I'll say it's only a matter of time before you have Qt on it. Most likely the Qt embedded stuff, so you get the benefit of the whole application stack for Qtopia/Opie(Opie also gives positive reply to the rest of your questions:-).
No they have not. It was just some musing from that John Dvorak fellow, where he wrote an article outlining why he thought that it would be a good idea for MS to buy Opera. None of his points where particularly good either, just his usuall less then cluefull drivel. Then some other even less cluefull at a site, CoolTechZone I think, turned his musings into rumor and reported it as fact. The only thing that annoys me most with those buyout rumours is that I don't have any Opera stock myself. Besides I predict that in the future Opera will get bought by Sun, Novell, IBM, Nitendo, Nokia and Sony-Ericsson in no particular order, all according to rumours. The last two even makes some sense in a small way.
The Linux BlueZ site wasn't selling anything either.
Not entirely true, they was "selling" the fact of which devices having support/works with Bluez/Bluethooth under Linux. They where not charging any money for it, but does not matter. Non-profit organizations are not exempt form trademark law either.
More importantly a copy of K&R should be in every programing book authors shelf.
the clear writing style and tidy code snippets are an example to all.
Exactly and I wish other writers could emulate that approach rather than trying to write as many pages as possible. Take any C++ book and compare the section about the basic datatypes to K&R, usually 5 to 10 times the number of pages and K&R are still easier to understand.
And it's not only programming books, you find the similar style in other fields of science too. And it's rather consistent, making me believe that most American publishers of technical books pays their authors at a per page ratio.
That is the most annoying feature I have EVER come across
It's basically a really powerfull and userfriendly feature, but some have to actually use it to understand that. i don't want to be forced to answer the "Do you want to..." for every single new type of media i have inserted.
Well how many different types of media do you regularly use? Probably no more than 4 or 5, most likely even less. And you then set the dialog to repeat that everytime with each of the mediatypes, making your preferred acction automatic rather. When that's done you will not see the dialog again for that media type. It's a rather smart designed feature. It lets you as a user define an automatic acction in a userfriendly way, rather than deciding for you what to do or doing nothing. Does anyone use it at all?
Yes, regularly with audio CD's. I either want to play it or rip it, the dialog gives me easy access to both functions. And if I insert a DVD, I have set i to automatically open my preferred player.
A commercial licence for Qt is either $1800 or $3100 per developer
And that's equals something like the cost of a decent developer for 1-2 weeks, making the price totally irrelevant for someone doing real commercial development.
I've had automounting for quite some time under gnome. Is KDE really just now getting the same feature?
Nope, the automounting feature has worked in KDE for a long time. And even KDE 2.0 had seamless mounting of CDs and floppy. This has really nothing to do with the mounting part, it's a tool for automating the acctions preformed after the media is inserted. Like when you insert a audio CD you get an userfriendly dialog asking you if you want to play it, rip it or do noting. And you can easily set it to do the same automatically each time width that kind of media. Or to never show anything if you prefer(aka turning the feature off).
I know under the hood Gnome is supposed to be better
That's rather the strangest thing I have heard all day, KDE is generally thought to be cleaner and better than Gnome under the hood. With the better underlying technology and architecture.
Gnome seems to have the API right but the desktop wrong and KDE has the desktop but not the API.
Seems like you have got that one backwards, the API are the one thing people usually praise with KDE. The complaints are about the "cluttered" desktop, indication that they think Gnomes is better.
but quite frankly as long as it works I don't really care.
Agreed, and there's the point where KDE wins out in the end. It got the applications and features making it possible to get the things you want done.
The other main argument against KDE is that it is too much of a Windows clone.
Anyone who have actually used KDE know it's not true, as KDE is much more. Funny thing is, set KDE up with a non-blue color scheme and those complaints dissapear.
Firefox has had the yellow=secure for quite a while,
The same for Konqueror, but it does not really mater that much. In this case the IE7 approach makes more sense, so they agree to change it. Besides calling yellow the de-facto standard is not correct, as de-facto would be what IE5 and IE6 uses.
Why do embedded developers continue to imprison themselves in the GPL trap by using Linux,
Because Linux has a much bigger developer comunity and you can get commercial support targeted at embedded development from several vendors. Giving better freedom getting developer resources.
And the GPL "trap" as you call it, does not really matter even in embedded development. The interesting part of the product, or the part you may want not to GPL, will reside in userspace anyway making the GPL of the kernel irrelevant.
The real issue is who is going to pay for the next generation of KDE development if SuSE isn't going to pay.
Not really, since KDE never has been dependant of corporate sponsorship and has always been more a comunity effort. Unlike others.
But all evidence points to this not being fact, since way more ISVs use Qt than GTK+ making that argument rather void. Commercial ISVs re used to, comfortable with and prefer paying for tools making their products better, cheaper to develop and having the safety commercial support.
It doesn't matter how good KDE is (and it's pretty good), its dependence on a dual-licensed GUI library kills it in commercial applications. Qt proponents can swear up and down that it doesn't matter to commercial customers, but the fact is that it does.
You often her that argument, but you never or hear see the follow up to it. Locally then the competing LGPLed library should be the preferred one for commercial applications. Why is it that the number of commercial Qt programs outnumber the GTK+ counterparts, with a rather large margin?
I wonder what percentage of the south korean economy is made up of those internet cafes. Switching OS's won't really be fun for them (if it comes to that.).
Does not really matter, as it's not like MS can reclaim already existing Windows installs. It may create some annoyances for people planing new deployments or upgrades, but existing install will not be affected in any way. It's like if Ford decided to stop making cars, it would not cause all the Fords currently on the road to stop working.
Except for Ximian connector for evolution, but that was the first ting they opened when taking over. Other than that I agree with you.
And you're going to replace this with what?
Some kind of international organization, governed by interest from several nation. Not giving the power to one single one.
An organization that will allow human rights abusers whose major intent will be to rob their own citizens of the ability to view the Internet freely?
That is a red herring, please call Amnesty some time and see which position they rank the US when it comes to abusing human rights. Hint, in the top ten.
Other than the xxx issue, can you think of any major abuse of the Internet done by the US government?
It only prove they have not done it yet. In important economical matters as the internet really is, you can't trust a nation which have used military force to protect corporations commercial interrest abroad. Repeatably.
Nope that's code for "The internet are a valuable global economic tool, which we more and more depend on. We don't trust a government who regularly(in the last 110 years or so) have used military intervention in foreign countries to aid US economic interest, to have sole controll over it." And before anyone starts the flaming please read up on US history since 1900 or so. You will find something like 70 or more cases.
Why wouldn't these people be in favour of an .xxx domain? Hell, wouldn't it make it easier to block sites at work or home?
.xxx the domain will make filtering extremely simple weakening their arguments and loosing them support. And by that lessen their power base, which is their real main objective.
These people are not in favour of choice on this kind of issues, they are against the idea of people having access to porn period. They use the demand for blocking sites only as a weapon, as they know the cost and technical impossibility of the task helps their agenda. Having
What a good idea .. think of how much money getting rid of half the directors sitting on the company's board would save!
Agreed and not only those. There are a few wielding director of something or other titles, actually regularly spreading FUD against main Novel products and part of their company product portfolio. I think it's time to get rid of those too.
As a fellow BCian we trade a heck of a lot of with China. That is what.. 16 hours ahead? (correct me if I am wrong) and we have no problems trading with them.
Then perhaps the average Chinese trading partner are smarter than the average American counterpart?
Yes, but not under the same conditions as Troll Tech; Troll Tech still retains the right to sell it under non-GPL'ed licenses.
Yes and they created it from scratch, nearly every line of code in Qt are paid for by Troll Tech. Usually they don't accept larger patches from the outside, they usually develop their own versions. So it's their property, they even give it all away under the GPL. And since you are talking about Free software, it does not really matter if they can sell it or not under a non-GPL license. Anyway you will most likely always be at an disadvantage trying to compete with Troll Tech on Qt, to even matter you'd need to have something in the land of 50-60 people full time doing development, documentation, QA and support. To simply match what they are doing, and to really compet you would have to do even better.
But if you want to compete with Troll Tech perhas you should start a toolkit from scratch, develop it over 10 years or so. Paying something like 50-60 full time employees to do the development, documentation and QA. Then you can come back and discuss giving your property away, or perhaps you have "got it" by then. BTW not even Linus and the Kernel hacker does that.
I remember my HP 48 being more stable. Those things are rock solid, so that's a rather bad comparison. You may make them hang, but it's rather easy to track. Not seemingly random as with the average PC.
Link Grammar was developed for English, and currently that is all that it supports.
A reasonable approach, but it may give reduced fitness for other languages. Limiting them to your design decisions, and the flexibility of your rules files. Depending upon how much height you have in the design for non English grammar. I'd guess we'll see the answers to that when someone try to add support for french and german. Having said that, MS have used lots of $ trying to do the same. And their solutions are from what the reports say, for the most part arenot particularly good either. love to have your contribution.
I am sad to admit that neither my linguistic skills in my native language or my math skills are up to the task. But if someone does, I'll try to help with testing and hopefully usefull bugreports.
I'd guess you are right, no one is going to care about this except those sorry bastards having their laptop on their lap when the battery overheat and melts.
Well many other languages have much simpler or more strict grammars than english so it is relevant for those, and with localisation for other areas that isn't a problem. By that I mean that maybe it works brilliant for 90% of languages but sometimes english isn't the best for everything. It's most probable to be the other way, making it even worse for non english languages. As it most likely are developed to work with english as the primary language, making it nearly impossible to localize to other languages.